Exploring Boundary Conditions of Goal-Driven Attentional Capture by Affective Categories: The Role of Prioritisation in Working Memory

When stimuli are retained in visual working memory (VWM), external stimuli which overlap this representation capture attention when performing a visual task. It has not been determined whether this mechanism can partly account for attentional capture by categories of real-world affective stimuli. Across five dual-task visual search and VWM change detection experiments (4/5 pre-registered; total N = 119) participants had to detect the change in either positive (kitten) or threat-related (spider) animal exemplars, whilst performing an intervening visual search task with peripheral distractors from these affective categories. Affective stimulus associations were confirmed by self-reported arousal and valence ratings in all samples, and confirmed in an independent sample (n = 82). It was hypothesised that threat-related and positive distractors would capture attention more, versus a neutral (bird or no distractor) baseline, when matching the contents of VWM. Experiments 1 - 3, however, found no evidence of increased capture by VWM-matching affective stimuli, though there was cumulative evidence of goal-independent capture by threat-related distractors. When, however, the trial structure became unpredictable, requiring constant preparation for the VWM task response (Experiment 4), or advanced action preparation to the VWM task was enabled (Experiment 5), then VWM-matching threat-related distractors caused greater attentional capture. This VWM-driven capture, however, was not found for positive distractors in any experiments. The results probe the boundary conditions when VWM contents drive attentional capture by entirely task-irrelevant affective categories, and suggests that background memory representations may not influence attention unconditionally, and instead may depend partly on their current prioritisation.